Custom has not been commonly regarded as a subject of any great moment. The

inner workings of our own brains we feel to be uniquely worthy of investigation,

but custom have a way of thinking, is behaviour at its most commonplace. As

a matter of fact, it is the other way around. Traditional custom, taken the world

over, is a mass of detailed behaviour more astonishing than what any one person

can ever evolve in individual actions, no matter how aberrant. Yet that is a rather

trivial aspect of the matter. The fact of first-rate importance is the predominant

role that custom plays in experience and in belief, and the very great varieties it

may manifest.

No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. He sees it edited by a

definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking. Even in his philo-

sophical probings he cannot go behind these stereotypes; his very concepts of

the true and the false will still have reference to his particular traditional cus-

toms. John Dewey has said in all seriousness that the part played by custom in

shaping the behaviour of the individual as over against any way in which he can

affect traditional custom, is as the proportion of the total vocabulary of his

mother tongue over against those words of his own baby talk that are taken up

into the vernacular of his family. When one seriously studies the social orders

that have had the opportunity to develop autonomously, the figure becomes no

more than an exact and matter-off-fact observation. The life history of the indi-

vidual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards

traditionally handed down in his community. From the moment of his birth the

customs into which he is born shape his experience and behaviour. By the time

he can talk, he is the little creature of his culture, and by the time he is grown and

able to take part in its activities, its habits are his habits, its beliefs his beliefs, its

impossibilities his impossibilities. Every child that is born into his group will

share them with him, and no child born into one on the opposite side of the globe

can ever achieve the thousandth part. There is no social problem it is more in-

cumbent upon us to understand than this of the role of custom. Until we are

intelligent as to its laws and varieties, the main complicating facts of human life

must remain unintelligible.

The study of custom can be profitable only after certain preliminary propo-

sitions have been accepted, and some of these propositions have been violently

opposed. In the first place any scientific study requires that there be no preferen-

tial weighting of one or another of the items in the series it selects for its con-

sideration. In all the less controversial fields like the study of cacti or termites or

the nature of nebulae, the necessary method of study is to group the relevant

material and to take note of all possible variant forms and conditions. In this way

we have learned all that we know of the laws of astronomy, or of the habits of the

social insects, let us say. It is only in the study of man himself that the major

social sciences have substituted the study of one local variation, that of Western

civilization.

Anthropology was by definition impossible as long as these distinctions be-

tween ourselves and the primitive, ourselves and the barbarian, ourselves and

the pagan, held sway over people's minds. It was necessary first to arrive at that

degree,of sophistication where we no longer set our own belief over against our

neighbour's superstition. It was necessary to recognize that these institutions

which are based on the same premises, let us say the supernatural, must be con-

sidered together, our own among the rest.

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